Barcelona

From TPU Reference

Overview

Barcelona is AMD's codename for the next series of Opteron processors for servers and workstations. Named after Formula One racing circuits (as is Budapest and Shanghai), Barcelona is AMD's answer to Intel's Clovertown processor series, claiming to be about 40 percent faster than the latter. Although both processors are quad-cores, Barcelona is a true quad-core implementation, whereas Clovertown is simply a merge of two dies onto a single processor.

Technology

Unlike previous Opterons, Barcelona is a complete redesign of the processor. About 90 percent of Barcelona was built from scratch, while the remaining bits were heavily modified.

Much of Barcelona's design focused on increasing performance and power efficiency. For example, while Barcelona maintains a similar thermal envelope as previous processors in the Opteron family, AMD has also added the ability for individual cores to be throttled.

Revisions

The first A0 revisions of the core were ladened with problems, pushing back AMD's expected release date for the processor. The A1 revision solved such problems and production of the parts are being ramped up as of January 2007. AMD expects to have Barcelona in retail channels by the first half of 2007. Barcelona-based Opterons will be marked as Revision H and are compatible with chipsets and motherboards supporting Socket F Opterons.

Future revisions include the Budapest and Shanghai parts. Budapest will introduce HyperTransport 3.0 technology, although only for the Opteron 11xx series and is currently slated for a Q4 2007 release. The Opteron 22xx and 88xx series equivalent, Shanghai, is expected to ship at 1H 2007.